Foreigner isn't a race, they can come from any culture or country. They are, however, our economic competitors.

Knowledge and skills are a resource that keeps American workers competitive, and it's about time we made more export restrictions for this kind of stuff.

FrancoFile:Knowledge is an infinitely renewable resource. They came her and paid for it, but we still have it. They could have gone to school in England, Germany, Australia, or Italy - but we got their money and someone else didn't.

Labor demand is. And America is losing tens of thousands of technical, middle-class jobs thanks to H visas and the companies too cheap to hire American.

serpent_sky:skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

skullkrusher:kvinesknows: skullkrusher: serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

you're making it sound like it is a huge violation of civil rights. Event organizers asked participants not to bring bags and provided clear ones to help protect the safety of participants if they did. I'm not terribly worried about this.

well if you are okay with everyone having clear bags for this. what about only clear bags all the time? no shopping bags, no purses, no brief cases, no gym bags...

thats okay right?

no. Of course, the crucial detail you're missing is that this was a regulation that the private group organizing the race put on runners participating in an event at a specified time and engaged in a specific activity. Not walking to work.

I can't talk on my cellphone during a movie. I find this restriction agreeable because it isn't everywhere I go no matter what I am doing.

Years ago (post 9/11) I used to work as a professional photographer. I would often travel with a backpack full of camera gear. Including radio transmitters and mulitple recievers in my carry on bag. I always expected to get questioned by TSA but never once did they even bat an eye.

kvinesknows:skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

you're making it sound like it is a huge violation of civil rights. Event organizers asked participants not to bring bags and provided clear ones to help protect the safety of participants if they did. I'm not terribly worried about this.

well if you are okay with everyone having clear bags for this. what about only clear bags all the time? no shopping bags, no purses, no brief cases, no gym bags...

thats okay right?

no. Of course, the crucial detail you're missing is that this was a regulation that the private group organizing the race put on runners participating in an event at a specified time and engaged in a specific activity. Not walking to work.

I can't talk on my cellphone during a movie. I find this restriction agreeable because it isn't everywhere I go no matter what I am doing.

a private race in a public place.

where participants are required to have a clear bag to participate. Do you see how this is very much unlike requiring people to carry clear bags at all times and how I could not be disturbed by one while finding the other unacceptable?

Ftfa:At about 10 a.m., cops cited a New Jersey woman for leaving an unattended bag under an empty stroller while she went to the bathroom, a source said.

Think about all the cars left unattended in the city! When it comes to terrorism, car bombs are far and away the greatest IED vector. They could have really cleaned up, had they been using their heads.

serpent_sky:skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

FWIW, when you check clothing at a running race you ALWAYS have to use the bag provided. They don't want to have to deal with people giving them random inconvenient bags. And sometimes the bags are clear.

The real outrage is fewer portapotties. On race morning I need a farking portapotty and there are already too few at almost every race.

skullkrusher:kvinesknows: skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

you're making it sound like it is a huge violation of civil rights. Event organizers asked participants not to bring bags and provided clear ones to help protect the safety of participants if they did. I'm not terribly worried about this.

well if you are okay with everyone having clear bags for this. what about only clear bags all the time? no shopping bags, no purses, no brief cases, no gym bags...

thats okay right?

no. Of course, the crucial detail you're missing is that this was a regulation that the private group organizing the race put on runners participating in an event at a specified time and engaged in a specific activity. Not walking to work.

I can't talk on my cellphone during a movie. I find this restriction agreeable because it isn't everywhere I go no matter what I am doing.

a private race in a public place.

where participants are required to have a clear bag to participate. Do you see how this is very much unlike requiring people to carry clear bags at all times and how I could not be disturbed by one while finding the other unacceptable?

kvinesknows:skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

you're making it sound like it is a huge violation of civil rights. Event organizers asked participants not to bring bags and provided clear ones to help protect the safety of participants if they did. I'm not terribly worried about this.

well if you are okay with everyone having clear bags for this. what about only clear bags all the time? no shopping bags, no purses, no brief cases, no gym bags...

thats okay right?

no. Of course, the crucial detail you're missing is that this was a regulation that the private group organizing the race put on runners participating in an event at a specified time and engaged in a specific activity. Not walking to work.

I can't talk on my cellphone during a movie. I find this restriction agreeable because it isn't everywhere I go no matter what I am doing.

a private race in a public place.

where participants are required to have a clear bag to participate. Do you see how this is very much unlike requiring people to carry clear bags at all times and how I could not be disturbed by one while finding the other unacceptable?

serpent_sky:The most offensive part of the article was this:"Runners at the 9K race in Central Park had to put all their belongings in clear plastic bags. Trash bins were removed from the route, and there were fewer porta-potties."

Not that I am shocked. I was saying on Monday "wait and see how many freedoms we lose and how many asinine precautions we'll now have to follow for "safety" after this."

I'd think everyone would realize that by now, but there are people who really don't see how bad it is getting. From the whole scene in Watertown, MA on Friday to having to use clear plastic bags at a farking marathon? None of this is acceptable.

OMG. You are a terrorist sympathizer. Me or my babies could be killed at next week's 5k thanks to fools like you who can't bothered to be inconvenienced when there are stark raving madmen prowling about trying to kill innocent men, women, and children.

Nobody needs a water bottle that contains more than 3 fluid oz. at a marathon.

This is for public safety. If we don't take precautions, we let the terrorists win.

The One True TheDavid:The Nazis didn't have anything close to the police state we do in the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

You are correct. They didn't have anything close to this. They had vastly VASTLY worse of a police state. We have reached a point in history when fewer and fewer people are around to tell stories of what it was like living in Nazi Germany, and you are the logical outcome of this disappearing information. Read some primary sources about life in Nazi Germany from the non-Jews who lived there. Then you can open your mouth without removing all doubt of your very high level of ignorance.

PC LOAD LETTER:The One True TheDavid: The Nazis didn't have anything close to the police state we do in the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

You are correct. They didn't have anything close to this. They had vastly VASTLY worse of a police state. We have reached a point in history when fewer and fewer people are around to tell stories of what it was like living in Nazi Germany, and you are the logical outcome of this disappearing information. Read some primary sources about life in Nazi Germany from the non-Jews who lived there. Then you can open your mouth without removing all doubt of your very high level of ignorance.

I find Nazi comparisons tiresome. Obviously we're not dealing with imminent fascism and anyone who's making those noises really needs to calm the fark down. But it's just as accurate to point out that the surveillance technologiesthat we have available to us would have been a Gestapo agents wet dream, so it's also not wrong to worry about incremental encroachments on our liberties in the name of security given the potential power that we could be granting to the government.

There is a reasonable middle ground between "OMG, NAZIS!" and saying that there is nothing to fear at all.

dusty15893:Years ago (post 9/11) I used to work as a professional photographer. I would often travel with a backpack full of camera gear. Including radio transmitters and mulitple recievers in my carry on bag. I always expected to get questioned by TSA but never once did they even bat an eye.That's all I got...

You must be a lot paler than me. I got yanked out of line and groped by the TSA last year for "suspicious canister shapes" in my bag. I guess the camera body between those two shapes didn't give it away that they were lenses

Yeah, but she's blond... um, was blond... um, since I haven't seen the carpet, I m not sure what's orginal in that department. But she also has nice boobs and is from Hollywood, so at least she has an excuse for being a clueless idiot. Still, Nice Boobies... if anyone has carpet picts, they would be appreciated.

skullkrusher:kvinesknows: skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: kvinesknows: skullkrusher: serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

you're making it sound like it is a huge violation of civil rights. Event organizers asked participants not to bring bags and provided clear ones to help protect the safety of participants if they did. I'm not terribly worried about this.

well if you are okay with everyone having clear bags for this. what about only clear bags all the time? no shopping bags, no purses, no brief cases, no gym bags...

thats okay right?

no. Of course, the crucial detail you're missing is that this was a regulation that the private group organizing the race put on runners participating in an event at a specified time and engaged in a specific activity. Not walking to work.

I can't talk on my cellphone during a movie. I find this restriction agreeable because it isn't everywhere I go no matter what I am doing.

a private race in a public place.

where participants are required to have a clear bag to participate. Do you see how this is very much unlike requiring people to carry clear bags at all times and how I could not be disturbed by one while finding the other unacceptable?

skullkrusher:theresnothinglft: The real question to be asked here: Why does your route to NJ pass through Central Park when you're biking? Why bike to NJ anyway?

He might've been riding to the GWB. AFAIK, the only Hudson crossing you can take a bike over. You're not riding a bike through a tunnel

That's true, the GWB is the only route you can bike over, which would make his route even more weird: FTFA, he lives in Harlem, biked south 1.5 miles at least to get to that location on W. 80th Street. The GWB is north of there (north of Harlem), so he essentially added 3 miles minimum to the trip. If he's trying to go on the Central Park Loop, he's much, much more distance.

It's more likely he's trying to get to the ferry to cross the river. In that case, going south from Harlem and maybe into the Park may make sense, but there are a lot better routes than actually getting on the Loop when there's a race going on, i.e., just go crosstown west until you hit the Hudson River bike path, or go down Columbus, where there's a bike path most of the way.

Jument:serpent_sky: skullkrusher: "Runners are being encouraged not to bring bags to the City Parks Foundation Run for the Parks, but people who do will be asked to put all their belongings in a clear, plastic bag provided by race officials. The NYRR cautions runners that any unattended bags will be confiscated. "

New York RoadRunners == Gestapo KGB Romanian Secret Police

I didn't say they were, but it's asinnine and just further erosions of freedoms. Soon, clear bags will be expected and required. Pat downs. All of that crap.

I've said for years I fear the day I simply can't leave the house anymore :/

FWIW, when you check clothing at a running race you ALWAYS have to use the bag provided. They don't want to have to deal with people giving them random inconvenient bags. And sometimes the bags are clear.

The real outrage is fewer portapotties. On race morning I need a farking portapotty and there are already too few at almost every race.

And now you have to be careful about announcing that you dropped a bomb in the portapotty

A fool who bicycled past a Central Park running race with a timer in his backpack caused a bomb scare yesterday

Oh, a fool huh? Just gonna lead off with that with no preliminary information? Why not, that seems like some crack objective journalism.

cops spotted a box with several wires

Oh gods no...a box...with wires! I hope I never get pulled over while I have my center console open...Holy shiat! It's....actually just an LED driver for some floor and console lights in a project box.

StrangeQ:A fool who bicycled past a Central Park running race with a timer in his backpack caused a bomb scare yesterday

Oh, a fool huh? Just gonna lead off with that with no preliminary information? Why not, that seems like some crack objective journalism.

cops spotted a box with several wires

Oh gods no...a box...with wires! I hope I never get pulled over while I have my center console open...[imageshack.us image 850x634]Holy shiat! It's....actually just an LED driver for some floor and console lights in a project box.

Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society.[32] In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined.[32] In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people.[33] "V-men", as undercover Gestapo agents were known, were used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but this was more the exception, not the rule.[34] The Gestapo office in Saarbrücken had 50 full-term informers in 1939.[34] The District Office in Nuremberg, which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a total of 80-100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945.[34] The vast majority of Gestapo informers were not full-term informers working undercover, but were rather ordinary citizens who for whatever reason chose to denounce those they knew to the Gestapo.[35]

NB: I didn't pick this up from Wikipedia but from actual books written by actual historians and from articles on JSTOR, but the above-cited article is good enough to reinforce my point.

Oh, and I have another point: when you suggest someone is a troll or a bigot, it helps to know more about the subject than you'd get from watching "Hogan's Heroes." Otherwise you're likely to wind up like you just did, publicly exposed as a knee-jerking idiot.

By the way, the German regime that was a more developed police state was the East German GDR, swiss-cheesed by the Stasi. Even they relied more on recruiting snitches than on, oh, making people carry clear plastic bags and stationing truckloads of riot cops along foot-race routes.

Pound for pound, the USA is currently the heaviest police state the world has ever seen. And even so it can't stop a couple of disgruntled misfits from blowing the legs off some fitness freaks. Note too that it took a stupid mistake (letting a hostage go) to alert the cops in the first place, and that the lone surviving suspect was found not by the heavily-armed gunmen that locked a whole city down but by a neighbor stepping out for a cigarette.

But don't let the facts slow you down, okay? If it weren't for people who insist on being idiots I wouldn't look so smart by comparison.

The Nazis didn't have anything close to the police state we do in the "land of the free and the home of the brave." Even before "9/11" the USA was cop-heavy.

And when the Gestapo etc. did get busy they concentrated on Jews, leaving ordinary Germans pretty much alone.

So, do y'all feel safe yet? Well, do ya, punks?

No, not really.

The brownshirts used to march up and down the streets with a Nazi flag, and if you didn't stop and give a stiff-armed salute, they would beat the shiat out of you right where you stood.

The problem is most Germans, at least the gentiles, had no problem with "giv[ing] a stiff-armed salute." In fact till late '44 the German gov't had loads of popular support. (Look stuff up, you'll see.)

And when the Gestapo etc. did get busy they concentrated on Jews, leaving ordinary Germans pretty much alone.

Is this a troll or a bigot?

From the Wikipedia article on the Gestapo, with references in the footnotes:

Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society.[32] In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined.[32] In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people.[33] "V-men", as undercover Gestapo agents were known, were used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but this was more the exception, not the rule.[34] The Gestapo office in Saarbrücken had 50 full-term informers in 1939.[34] The District Office in Nuremberg, which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a total of 80-100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945.[34] The vast majority of Gestapo informers were not full-term informers working undercover, but were rather ordinary citizens who for whatever reason chose to denounce those they knew to the Gestapo.[35]NB: I didn't pick this up from Wikipedia but from actual books written by actual historians and from articles on JSTOR, but the above-cited article is good enough to reinforce my point.

Oh, and I have another point: when you suggest someone is a troll or a bigot, it helps to know more about the subject than you'd get from watching "Hogan's Heroes." Otherwise you're likely to wind up like you just did, publicly exposed as a knee-jerking idiot.

By the way, the German regime that was a more developed police state was the East German GDR, swiss-cheesed by the Stasi. Even they relied more on recruiting snitches than on, oh, making people carry clear plastic bags an ...

he might've been referring to your implication that Jews were not "ordinary Germans"

skullkrusher:StrangeQ: A fool who bicycled past a Central Park running race with a timer in his backpack caused a bomb scare yesterday

Oh, a fool huh? Just gonna lead off with that with no preliminary information? Why not, that seems like some crack objective journalism.

cops spotted a box with several wires

Oh gods no...a box...with wires! I hope I never get pulled over while I have my center console open...[imageshack.us image 850x634]Holy shiat! It's....actually just an LED driver for some floor and console lights in a project box.

how much time does it spend in your backpack?

If I rode a bike and used it to drive some nighttime LEDs while I was riding around, probably a good amount.

And when the Gestapo etc. did get busy they concentrated on Jews, leaving ordinary Germans pretty much alone.

Is this a troll or a bigot?

From the Wikipedia article on the Gestapo, with references in the footnotes:

Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society.[32] In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined.[32] In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people.[33] "V-men", as undercover Gestapo agents were known, were used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but this was more the exception, not the rule.[34] The Gestapo office in Saarbrücken had 50 full-term informers in 1939.[34] The District Office in Nuremberg, which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a total of 80-100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945.[34] The vast majority of Gestapo informers were not full-term informers working undercover, but were rather ordinary citizens who for whatever reason chose to denounce those they knew to the Gestapo.[35]NB: I didn't pick this up from Wikipedia but from actual books written by actual historians and from articles on JSTOR, but the above-cited article is good enough to reinforce my point.

Oh, and I have another point: when you suggest someone is a troll or a bigot, it helps to know more about the subject than you'd get from watching "Hogan's Heroes." Otherwise you're likely to wind up like you just did, publicly exposed as a knee-jerking idiot.

By the way, the German regime that was a more developed police state was the East German GDR, swiss-cheesed by the Stasi. Even they relied more on recruiting snitches than on, oh, making people carry clear plastic bags an ...

I highlighted the, uh, big point of your argument you politely skip over. Are you including the SS into your argument? Cause the gestapo and SS were two entirely different beasts. Yes, the Gestapo was a laid back police force that didn't do much until it came under the purveyance of the SS. The SS police (SS who were used as internal German police, I don't think they were ever called "SS Police") did run around killing all the Jews they could find.

But still, there are a lot of comparing/contrasting you can do with the SS and modern US police forces. One similarity is the level of armament between the two. Both US police forces and the SS had/have paramilitary training and equipment. This is a big concern. One significant difference, however, is that the SS had no checks or balances and were in the palm of someone with complete control (Himmler). There actually were some checks and balances early on, as the civilian Gestapo police tried to arrest some SS at one point very early on. But those quickly eroded.

Right now, however, if you look at many states in the US it's very scary the leeway given when a state governor or the POTUS declares a "state of emergency". All the checks and balances in the US can quickly go out the window. Governors can pretty much take their state national guard and entire state police force and install martial law during a "state of emergency" without any checks or balances. God forbid the US is ever invaded by a foreign entity, or there be a domestic uprising. The non-affected areas would turn into a ridiculous overzealoused police state. They wouldn't run around killing people or sending them to internment camps, but you would quickly see first, fourth, and probably second amendments dissolved all for "oh, but this is an emergency". They'd be on the books, but they'd be inactive during the state of emergency.

skullkrusher:he might've been referring to your implication that Jews were not "ordinary Germans"

nickerj1:Are you including the SS into your argument? Cause the gestapo and SS were two entirely different beasts. Yes, the Gestapo was a laid back police force that didn't do much until it came under the purveyance of the SS. The SS police (SS who were used as internal German police, I don't think they were ever called "SS Police") did run around killing all the Jews they could find.

Forgive me: I assumed everybody knows that the Nazi regime was by its very self-definition antisemitic and that the SS did a lot of the work of making the Third Reich "Jew-free," so no I didn't include Jews under "ordinary" Germans (and anyway by the time the major Jew-murdering began in 1941 most Germans didn't either), nor did I refer to the Holocaust against the Jews . That's because one major difference between the racism in the USA, even in the pre-MLK ex-Confederacy, is that in the 20th century we had no analogue to the Shoah here: America exploited and repressed its minorities instead of killing them off en masse. So I'd thought that until what some hyperbolists label "The 4th Reich" starts putting any given minority in death camps there will be reason to bring up the Jews when discussing any other police state.

Of course I was mistaken.

So if anybody feels I slighted the Jews, especially people who are themselves Jewish, I apologize for not mentioning them. Another, perhaps better, way to put my point woud have been something like "except for its specifically anti-Jewish actions the Nazi police forces didn't concentrate much on German civilians."

But that's not strictly true. The Nazis (often fatally) persecuted the Jehovah's Witnesses, GLBTQs, Roma & Sinti ("Gipsy") peoples, fundamentalists Christians who objected to worshipping Hitler alongside God & Jesus, hard-core leftists (Stalinists, Trotskyites, Bakuninists), pacificts (e.g., Quakers & Tolstoyans), refugees from Francoism who'd fled to France and got rounded up there, the several million Soviet POWs who were summarily executed or left to starve to death, etc. etc. However clearly these 3-6 million non-Jews killed by the Nazis (and their allies) don't really count as genuine victims, so of course I'm only bringing them up as a pedantic in-joke, really.

By the way, there is no way to prove you're not an antisemite because the mere allegation is enough to condemn you: even kissing the asses of every Jew in Brooklyn and leaving one's entire Powerball winnings to Hadassah won't expunge that chametz. I don't accept the label of "antisemite" label for myself, and indeed would jump in on the Jews' side in any domestic pogrom, but then I'm a gentile so of course I'm talking shiat.

Nevertheless, in the off-chance that hypothetical any PC mob would listen to my pitiably hypocritical "self-justification" before stoning me, my implied criticism of the "pro-Israel lobby" is meant to resemble the point Zionists are always making about people who butt in with "What about the Palestinians?!?" whenever anybody points out the (I'd think obvious) fact that that for all its faults the State of Israel is quite a bit closer to democracy than any of its neighbors (including even its ally Turkey).

Which still can't really be the same because in the greater Muslim world there has never been anything analogous to the Nazi persecution of the Jews: feel free to ignore the Armenians and Kurds, for example, who don't count as real victims either because their oppressors were neither Aryans nor the right kind of Semites.

And while we're at it, the Chinese Maoists also oppressed the Tajiks of Xinjiang and the Han Chinese and Tibetan Muslim neighbors, but most criticisms of Red Chinese history don't mention them either. Perhaps this is a reflection of widespread anti-Muslim bias in Western historiography that we might perhaps keep in mind. And while we're being pointlessly apologetic let's not neglect the Slavic Russians' current oppression of the Caucasian Muslim Chechens, which some might say drove the Boston Bombers to their reprehensible actions. But, of course, nothing in human history ever remotely resembled Germany from 1933-1945.

OH. Some very detail-oriented PC purist might remind me about the North American indigenes who've been pretty much wiped out since the early 16th century. How can I possibly bring up the Hitlerian police state without bringing them up? But again, there's really no need to apologize for not mentioning them unless they really were the descendents of the 10 Lost Tribes, but that'd still be a piece of pedantic "irony" because even they they weren't killed by a Germanic people (i.e. the Anglo-Saxons) because of their Hebraic and/or Lamanite ancestry.

Doubtless in my analogy to the police agencies of the erstwhile German fascist regime I left out hundreds of other religious and/or ethnic minorities who were ever repressed by anybody for any reason ("What about the Neanderthals?!?") and who surely were at some point counted as "ordinary" in some sense by somebody; therefore, for the sake of foolish consistency -- despite not being specifically required to do so -- I really should hedge my bets and apologize also to each and every non-Jewish group on the face of the Earth, because sooner or later every group is going to oppressed by at least one other. ("What about the Ammonites and the Jebusites?!?")

So. Anyway. I'm very sorry that I ever brought up the Gestapo or anything connected to it without mentioning the Jews and the Holocaust against them. Clearly we all should do our parts each and every day to ensure that that exceptionally significant and totally unprecedented fact of history always occupies the foremost place in the center of our forebrains.

Oh what the hell: will everybody who's been in any way offended by this raving rant of mine please go ahead and subscribe me to your Ignore files? And while you're at it, for those of you who missed the several occasions I've done this, please Ignore me if for any reason it bothers you that anybody might ever point out that pedophiles are also people and/or human beings, whichever the case may be. Sometimes I hope there are 5 or 6 exceptionally thick-skinned Farkers I'm simply not smart enough to figure out any way to insult or offend, but it wouldn't surprise me to find I have no reader(s) but my imaginary friend(s).

Okay? Okay.

P.S. I haven't started drinking yet tonight, in case anybody's wondering. Even though by the time I click "Add Comment" it will be at least 11:50 PM EDT. The fact is I somehow forgot. Incipient senility strikes again, dammit.

[www.upl.co image 400x345]Biking rudely? Foreign? Handy with electronics? Addicted to his cellphone? Weird hobbies? Sounds like a bog-standard New Yorker to me. Glue your chicken-head back on and GBTW.

/arguable that being an asshat and looking for attention are, in fact, bog-standard NYC behaviors

HEY! I haven't set foot in NYC since 1988. Why should those people up there be more special than me?!?

The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, that called for active opposition to dictator Adolf Hitler's regime.

Oh. Of course you can't get more ordinary than a group of philosophy students and their professor in the University of Munich from June 1942 until February 1943. Whatever was I thinking?!?